Upgrade - clear-out

Discussions in English on installing or upgrading Fedora
#1

Using DNF upgrade makes for an easier time when bringing systems up-to-date.

In addition to replacing ‘old version’ with ‘latest release’ of each software item, is there a process to clear-away junk, eg orphaned modules?

For example, Python 2 has long given way to Python 3, so if we no longer need Python 2 to run any remaining applications (if!), will the upgrade process also clear-away out-dated code that is no-longer required?

Alternately, should we schedule a ‘clean install’ every so-many updates?

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#2

Otherwise, the packages are either marked as user-installed, or as dependencies for user-installed.
Thus, there is no reliable way to determine if the user really needs them or not.
E.g. someone may have installed it specifically to run legacy version-specific code.

#3

Thank you.

I don’t recall ‘autoremove’ being included within the precautions and instructions for upgrading. (that said, haven’t started to read the latest upgrade’s data)

As a general ‘housekeeping’ principle: would it be appropriate to upgrade most releases, but perform a ‘clean install’ every two/three/five?

#4

It might be worth reinstalling if you need new features which are problematic to migrate such as Btrfs, otherwise there is barely any good reason.
Actually you can clear-out a lot more packages by marking as user-installed only essential ones and those that you really need and discarding everything else.

#5

Thank you.
Have finally found some time - and performed a fresh install. Was not time-expensive thanks to separate / and /home (and other) partitions! Only ‘extra’ was having to add back certain system-wide applications. The GIMP was a problem, but ‘fixed’ that by using flatpak instead of dnf.
Regards =dn

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